The popularity of home interior decorating and design continues to grow at an accelerating rate. Residential consumers demonstrate a strong desire to decorate and personalize their homes, apartments, offices, businesses, etc. by spending considerable sums on home decorating products and services. However, while residential consumers indicate a willingness to decorate their own residential and business spaces, such consumers often experience difficulty and frustration when doing so. Selecting colors, textures, patterns, accessories, lighting and the like to complement home or business architecture while expressing their personality preferences can be a daunting task for consumers who typically do not have formal interior decorating and design education.
While consumers can retain the services of professional interior decorators and designers, that is, those who have or claim to have formal education in these areas, many consumers choose not to do so for a variety of reasons. Consumers may find the services of such professionals to be cost-prohibitive, particularly when services are needed to decorate entire rooms, offices, homes or buildings. Consumers also may find it difficult to find an interior decorating and/or design professional that can appreciate and express the consumers' personal style preferences. Consumers also may hesitate to hire professional interior decorators and designers simply because they find it enjoyable and personally rewarding to decorate their own personal spaces.
The interior decorating of a residential or consumer space involves the selection of one or more of a variety of design elements, including, for example, paint, fabrics, carpeting, accessories and the like. However, to select such elements, consumers typically find it necessary to visit a variety of home products retailers, view hundreds of paint samples, fabric samples, carpeting samples, lighting and accessories, usually under poor conditions, and attempt to choose appropriate options with poor to fair staff assistance. Moreover, when decorating an entire room, house or office, consumers usually must select wall color, texture and pattern, carpet color, texture and pattern, and fabric color, texture and pattern in isolation, attempting to coordinate all the design components without the ability to view them together as a design scheme.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide an apparatus that assists a user in selecting a decorating scheme. It is also desirable to provide an apparatus that presents to a user a plurality of design components viewable at the same time. In addition, it is desirable to provide an improved method for selecting a decorating scheme. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the invention and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the invention.